Short Courses

This short course teaches participants how to model silicon photonic components, design and have fabricated simple passive photonic integrated circuits (PICs) that are experimentally characterized. Numerous companies are presently developing products in applications such as short-reach optical interconnects for data centres. 

We will go through a step-by-step design methodology to design optical filters based on Bragg gratings – specifically, Contra-Directional Grating Assisted Couplers (CDCs) – including identifying target specifications, analytic modeling, designing the photonic component for the chosen parameters, layout for fabrication, and finally, experimental data analysis.

Participant will have one month after OFC to complete their designs.  The fabrication process involves passive-only components, namely waveguides, grating couplers, Bragg gratings, ring resonators, and so on.  Participants will submit their designs, which will be fabricated by a state-of-the-art rapid-prototyping 100 keV electron-beam lithography facility.  All designs will be tested using an automated optical probe station at the University of British Columbia and the data will be provided to the participants. Participants will then analyze their experimental data.

Temporary licenses to Lumerical Solutions and open-source tools will be provided during and after the workshop to complete the design cycle.

Note that the two courses – SC432 and SC454 – can be taken independently or one after the other. 

This course should enable you to:

• Model select silicon photonic components.
• Create compact models for silicon photonic components.
• Use commercial modelling tools (Lumerical Solutions).
• Design a basic silicon photonic circuit.
• Create a silicon photonic layout and submit for manufacturing.
• Analyze experimental data from real measurements.
• Compare modeling with real-life experimental results.  

This course is targeted for researchers and students who want to learn how to model and design real silicon photonic components. Familiarity with optics and electromagnetics is a prerequisite.  No previous silicon photonic design experience is required.

Participants shall bring their own laptop computers, with the required software pre-installed.  Licenses and instructions for installing Lumerical Solutions software, and mask layout software, will be provided prior to the course.

Lukas Chrostowski is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Born in Poland, he earned a B.Eng. from McGill University and a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. His research interests are in silicon photonics, optoelectronics and lasers, including design fabrication and test, for applications in optical communications, biophotonics and quantum information, and he has published more than 300 journal and conference publications. He co-authored the textbook “Silicon Photonics Design” (Cambridge University Press, 2015).  Dr. Chrostowski served as the co-director of the University of British Columbia Nanofabrication Facility between 2008 and 2017.  He was the Program Director the NSERC CREATE Silicon Electronic-Photonic Integrated Circuits (SiEPIC) research training program in Canada (2012-2018), www.siepic.ca, and has been teaching numerous silicon photonics workshops and courses since 2008.  Chrostowski received the Killam Teaching Prize at the University of British Columbia in 2014.  He was an elected member of the IEEE Photonics 2014-2016 Society Board of Governors.  He was awarded a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Accelerator Supplements Award in 2015 for his research in “silicon photonics integrated circuit design”. He was elected to the college of the Royal Society of Canada in 2019. He is the Program Director for the NSERC CREATE Quantum Computing research training program in Canada (2020-), www.quantum-bc.ca.